Contents

introduction

Microformats are based on simple markup conventions that enable you to add meaningful structure to your web content.

One of the key principles of microformats, is to privilege human readable content. This means that you should think first and foremost of your content design being readable and accessible to web viewers. Using the most appropriate HTML elements and applying structured class names to your markup enables you to produce content that can be clearly understood by a human audience and also used in a structured way by automated programs and other online tools. But the point is that you shouldn't have to go out of your way to produce such machine friendly markup - microformats make it easy to integrate this greater degree of structure into your websites, without the overhead of having to learn complicated new languages or formats.

The best way to understand microformats is to start using them straight away. Since they're embedded in ordinary HTML, you can take existing pages and add these structured class names to the markup, but it's recommended that when doing this, you also take a close look at the overall tag structure that you're using - maybe there is a better way to say what you mean using basic HTML tags.

Many common kinds of content can be marked up in microformats. Microformats are designed to be similar to current markup styles. Chances are, you already have some of them on your site. Start with the obvious ones. For example a simple, and very popular place to start is with h-card - a microformat for displaying personal and organizational contact details. You can think of h-card as a way to embed mini business cards in web pages, but glancing over the examples shows a lot more possibilities than just that. Here are some specific places to start using microformats today:

yourself

your website

If you have your own website, read h-card-authoring for tips and guidelines on how to best markup existing content with h-card and take a look at the h-card-examples, then

your blog

your organization

website

contact info

Contact info. Every company or organization has a contact or about page of some sort on their website. Read h-card-authoring and add h-card to the contact/about pages along with "Add to address book" links for each h-card.

Employee directory. If your company has a page listing employees or others that belong to the organization, add h-card to the listings or search results.